The Bullroarer Atlas

No. JSTEWARD1941-002

Ash Meadows Southern Paiute bullroarer

United States · Ash Meadows, Amargosa Valley, Nye County, Nevada · North America · Great Basin

Function not recorded

A Yavapai medicine bullroarer from Fort McDowell: a broad blunt-ended wooden board incised with lightning zigzags and attached to a long looped cord.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Yavapai medicine bullroarer with lightning incisions and cord, Pitt Rivers Museum. Image source

Source term: Bull-roarer

Ash Meadows stood at the northwestern edge of native farming in the desert West. Its Southern Paiute families planted corn, squash, beans and sunflowers in small plots on moist ground by the springs, owned their own groves of mesquite and screw bean, and destroyed a field when its owner died, even with the harvest days away. The bullroarer was known here too. Most of what was remembered of this life came from a Southern Paiute woman raised at Pahrump who spoke little English; her husband passed it on.

Particulars

Object
Not described; the Great Basin form is a flat wooden slat swung on a cord from a short handle stick.
Function
Not recorded.

Sources

  1. Julian H. Steward, 'Culture Element Distributions: XIII, Nevada Shoshoni,' Anthropological Records 4:2 (1941), p. 307, element 1870; informant notes pp. 213-214; also p. 231 View · archived
  2. Julian H. Steward, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 120 (1938), pp. 182-183 View

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.